A busy week in Cairns: UoN researchers present at the International Ethology Conference

The 34th bi-annual International Ethology Conference was held last week (9-14th August) in Cairns on the northern East coast of Australia. The combination of a society renowned for its outstanding quality of animal behaviour research combined with a magnificent and warm location proved to be convincing. The meeting drew nearly 800 delegates from 43 countries around the world, and hosted a total of over 800 talks and posters over the 5 day conference. Symposium sessions covered a host of topics from the use of virtual technology to study animal behaviour, the genetics of invasive species, novel approaches to exploring how what non humans understand about the minds of social companions, all the way through to comparative brain evolution. The largest 1-2 days symposiums included that organised by Dr Carel Ten Cate & Dr Healy on the cognition of birds and that on the effects of human-induced environmental change on the behaviour and cognition of animals, co-organised Dr Griffin from our School of Psychology, and a small team of Australian and international researchers. Significant research focus on the impacts of human-induced environmental change has the attention of publishers with requests from two international journals for dedicated edited special issues.

The School of Psychology was very well represented at the conference with seven delegates, five from Dr Griffin’s Comparative Cognition Lab and Dr Burke and PhD student Danielle Wagstaff. Dr Griffin presented recent research using computational modelling to determine whether animals need to be smart to solve novel problems, or just persistent. PhD student Marie Diquelou delivered a talk on how control practices are causing common myna to change their behaviour and Francoise Lermite talked about the behavioural traits that might facilitate the range expansion of this invasive species in Australia. UoN conjoint lecturer UoN visiting post-doc Dr Ira Federspiel discussed the behavioural adaptations that allow mynas to thrive in human-dominated environments, while Dr David Guez spoke about the most approproiate methods for determining why animals change their willingness to solve problems when they are in groups. Dr Burke and PhD student, Danielle Wagstaff spoke about mate choice in humans.

This international gathering of leading behavioural scientists has provided invaluable networking opportunities for UoN PhD students. International bonds have been created, future collaborative research plans have been made and scientific articles and special issues initiated. There is no doubt that the conference was a huge success and UoN researchers wish to thank the Macquarie University organising team.


 PHOTO: Dr Andrea Griffin along side collaborators Dr Healy and Dr Guillette from University of St Andrews, Scotland, and Dr Federspield, postdoc in Dr Griffin's Comparative Cognition Lab in 2014, now back at University of Vienna. (courtesy of P. C., 2015)

 

Seminar Talk by Dr. Tanya Hanstock: Utilising Life Logging Technology to Help Prevent Relapse in Bipolar Disorder

Health and Clinical Psychology Research Group Seminar 

Title: Utilising Life Logging Technology to Help Prevent Relapse in Bipolar Disorder

Presenter: Dr Tanya Hanstock

Date: Monday 31/8 at 12 noon

Location: Keats Reading Room (video to Ourimbah)

Contact: Ross.Wilkinson@newcastle.edu.au

Abstract:

Bipolar Disorder (BD) is a lifelong and often chronically relapsing mental health disorder. It is rated as the sixth most debilitating disorder worldwide. People with BD and their carers are often aware of a number of signs of an impending relapse into a depressed or elevated mood state. A number of lifestyle changes can place a person with BD at risk of a relapse. Such lifestyle events include changes in sleep/wake cycle, activity level and external stimulation. Monitoring these lifestyle changes has traditionally been conducted via subjective measures such as the Social Rhythm Metric (SRM) in Interpersonal Social Rhythm Therapy (IPSRT). IPSRT was the first psychological therapy designed especially for BD. Other ways to try and predict relapse in BD is through the client and clinician completing psychological measures. Our planned study aims to determine how lifestyle factors recorded in IPSRT and other subjective measures can be better recorded via objective and real time measures such as lifestyle logging devices. We will be examining whether the use of the Fitbit Charge HR and a specifically designed smartphone app can help individuals with BD monitor their lifestyle and help establish a pattern of change that early indicates impending relapse. We aim to find that these readily available technologies can help people with BD to stay well and remain out of hospital.

STAFF TALK ON PERSONALITY by Dr MIles Bore, UON School of Psychology

 

Please join us for a research presentation on the 1th of September by Dr Miles Bore. This talk is sponsored by the school’s Social and Organisational Psychology research group. Details of talk and speaker below.

WHO/WHAT FOR: Dr Miles Bore, School of Psychology, UON will deliver a research presentation entitled “Four streams of personality research: resilient well-being, measuring childhood personality, cultural differences in moral types, and individual differences in sexuality”
WHEN: Tuesday 1st September, 12-1pm,
WHERE: Keats room, Aviation building, Callaghan
WHERELSE:  video conferenced to: Meeting room, Science Offices, Ourimbah (please advise Stefania if you plan to be at the Ourimbah end)

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this presentation is to give an overview of research in personality which I have focussed on during my recent study leave. This covers four on-going research streams. 

Resilient Well-being: utilises a three-trait model develop by Bore, Munro and Powis through their research since 1997 on the selection of medical students. The three traits are Involvement (with others), Emotional Resilience and Self-Control. I will present the results of two studies that provide evidence of the validity of the model in predicting psychological distress and well-being. 

Childhood personality: I will present the findings of a pilot study (n = 642) in which a cohort of 11 and 12 year old children completed a self-report measure of the Big Five personality traits. Reliability and evidence of construct validity were found as well as clear developmental differences in the degree of trait differentiation between males and females at this age. 

Cultural difference in moral types: I will outline research being conducted by Houlcroft, Bore, Munro and Powis exploring cross-cultural differences in moral orientation using Personal Qualities Assessment data gathered from 13 countries, n = 56,686.

Personality and sexuality: The Affective Neuroscience Personality Scale is based on Jaak Panksepp’s theory of seven emotional systems: fear, anger, sadness, play, seeking, care and lust. However, the authors of the ANPS did not include items to measure lust. Bore and Boer developed items to measure lust which we defined as Trait 
Subjective Sexual Arousal (TSSA). A sample of n = 349 psychology completed a battery of questionnaires including the ANPS (with TSSA items) and rated images from the International Affective Picture System. The findings of note were that the TSSA scores produced a meaningful three component structure that was differentially related to other personality traits and, for female participants, significantly predicted arousal and valence ratings of sexual image stimuli.

BIO: Miles completed his PhD in Psychology in 2002 and is a Senior Lecture in the School of Psychology at the University of Newcastle. He is a founding member of the Personal Qualities Assessment research and consultancy group (www.pqa.net.au) and is an Associate Investigator on multiple grants with the NSW Child Development Study based at the University of NSW (http://nsw-cds.com.au ). He has published 1 book, 3 book chapters, 26 journal articles and has 5 articles currently under review. Miles has been the Deputy Chair of the Human Research Ethics Committee, the Bachelor of Psychology Program Convenor, Head of the School of Psychology and is currently the Chair of the Australian Conference on Personality and Individual Differences (www.acpid.org ). He is a registered Psychologist and member of the Australian Psychological Society.

Publications in the Pipeline:
Bore, M., Pittolo, C., Kirby, D., Dluzewska, T., & Marlin, S. Predictors of psychological distress and well-being in a sample of Australian undergraduate students. Submitted to Higher Education Research and Development. Accepted for publication subject to minor changes.

Bore, M., Kelly, B., and Nair, B. Personality and other predictors of psychological distress and well-being in medical students. Submitted for review to Personality and Individual Differences.

Bore, M., Laurens, K.R., Raudino, A., Green, M.J., Tzoumakis, S., Harris, F., & Carr, V. Piloting a short-form self-report measure of the Big Five with a sample of Australian children: evidence of sex-based differences in personality development. Submitted for review to Personality and Individual Differences.

University of Newcastle researchers present at the international meeting of the Society for the Study of Individual Differences, Ontario, Canada

Miles Bore and Don Munro from the School of Psychology, University of Newcastle, attended the conference of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (ISSID – linked to the journal Personality and Individual Differences) at University of Western Ontario, Canada, in late July. Miles presented a paper on his work with Amanda Boer on a new scale of trait subjective sexual arousal, and Don presented aspects of his 7-year study with Miles and David Powis on the predictive value of non-cognitive medical school selection measures with Hull York Medical School in England. Both papers were well received.

Two topics/issues dominated the conference: (1) Work on the “Dark Triad” of Narcissism, Psychopathy and Machiavellianism, together with a new construct of Everyday Sadism (making a ‘Dark Tetrad’), and (2) Strong criticisms of the prevailing “Big Five” trait model of personality, in favour of more complex measures and possibly a return to the theories and measures of several decades ago that have been relatively neglected while the Big 5 has held sway.

Bridging the Gap between Behavioural and Neural Data Streams

Last week, PhD candidate Pete Cassey from the Newcastle Cognition Lab submitted his thesis (yay!). A focus of his thesis was linking behavioural and neural data, which is an effective way to advance cognitive-neuroscientific theory. Pete’s thesis contains multiple projects using two different linking approaches. Qualitative linking approaches involve fitting a cognitive model to behavioural data and then, based on the results of this model fitting, make predictions about the nature of the neural data. Pete used such linking approaches to explore the neural analogues of specific mechanisms of a cognitive decision making model. Also, in a clinical application, this approach was used to uncover latent level mechanisms involved in individuals’ suffering from Major Depressive disorder inability to disengage from negative emotional stimuli.

While qualitative linking approaches are currently standard, across the field, quantitative linking approaches are relatively new in cognitive neruoscience. With his supervisor, Scott Brown, and collaborators, Garren Gaut and Mark Steyvers (UC Irvine), Pete developed a novel joint modelling framework which tightly (quantitatively) links behavioural and neural data streams. This framework allows both data streams to be simultaneously addressed within the one modelling framework. This forces much tighter constraints on the type of relationship(s) that can exist between the two streams, allowing for more explicit tests of linking assumptions.

Pete is moving to Nashville to take up a postdoc position with Gordon Logan and Geoff Woodman at Vanderbilt University – as well as pursuing his dream of becoming a country music star. The postdoc will extend on the work of Pete’s thesis, exploring new ways of linking behavioural and neural data streams. Good luck, Pete!

JUST PUBLISHED in PNAS: A new imaging study by Prof. Simon Dennis and colleagues uncovers the representation of time and space in the human brain

Memory stretches over a lifetime. In controlled laboratory settings, the hippocampus and other medial temporal lobe brain structures have been shown to represent space and time on the scale of meters and seconds. It remains unclear whether the hippocampus also represents space and time over the longer scales necessary for human episodic memory. We recorded neural activity while participants relived their own experiences, cued by photographs taken with a custom lifelogging device. We found that the left anterior hippocampus represents space and time for a month of remembered events occurring over distances of up to 30 km. Although previous studies have identified similar drifts in representational similarity across space or time over the relatively brief time scales (seconds to minutes) that characterize individual episodic memories, our results provide compelling evidence that a similar pattern of spatiotemporal organization also exists for organizing distinct memories that are distant in space and time. These results further support the emerging view that the anterior, as opposed to posterior, hippocampus integrates distinct experiences, thereby providing a scaffold for encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memories on the scale of our lives.


Details:
Human hippocampus represents space and time during retrieval of real-world memories.
Dylan M. Nielson , Troy A. Smith , Vishnu Sreekumar , Simon Dennis, and Per B. Sederberg.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Link:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/08/12/1507104112.full.pdf

Coverage in popular media:
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/77188/20150817/study-uses-data-smartphone-necklace-map-memories-brain.htm